One of many prime feedback on a brand new video from the Victoria and Albert Museum reads as follows: “I believe it’s time to have a renaissance of mourning. On this age of sanitized and hidden grief, it might be a welcomed reduction for a extra refined mourning expertise.”
This commenter is responding to 2 V&A curators unboxing a group of Nineteenth-century objects frequent in Victorian mourning traditions. By a wide range of clothes, ephemera, and images, the pair showcases the flowery rituals and rites individuals as soon as used to honor the lifeless.
The video highlights a black, silk robe with tiny pleats, delicate lace, and sequins, together with jewellery produced from semi-precious jet stones, and brooches containing human hair. The curators additionally current a number of printed artifacts, like mourning playing cards and portraits of the dying.
What turns into clear all through the video is how a lot our up to date tradition of grief and loss has turned inward and is one thing managed privately fairly than shared with a neighborhood. “Mourning objects may be private, transportable, ostentatious, sentimental, or perhaps a little bit grizzly,” the curators add. “Is it an excessive amount of? Or do you assume we must always mourn the passing of those poignant and engaging trappings of grief?”
Discover the unboxing on YouTube, together with a number of extra adventures within the museum’s collections.
